Digital Equipment Corporation, almost always called DEC, was for decades the leading maker of minicomputers. The Computer History Museum’s profile of co-founder Ken Olsen records that Olsen established the company in 1957 with colleague Harlan Anderson, backed by America’s first venture capital firm. DEC’s own corporate history, “Digital 1957 to the Present,” documents the company’s growth across the two decades that followed.
DEC built its reputation on the introduction of the minicomputer, a class of machines smaller and cheaper than the room-sized mainframes of the era. Its PDP line and, later, the 32-bit VAX line running the VMS operating system became standard equipment in research laboratories and engineering departments around the world.
Those machines matter to the history of programming because of what ran on them. The early versions of Unix at Bell Labs were developed on DEC PDP computers, and the 1974 Unix paper describes the system running on the PDP-11. DEC hardware was, in effect, the proving ground for a generation of systems software.
The Computer History Museum profile notes that by the mid-1980s DEC had become “the second-largest computer company in the world,” but it lacked a clear strategic response when the personal computer revolution arrived. Ken Olsen departed in 1992, and Compaq acquired the company in 1998, with the remnants eventually passing to Hewlett-Packard.